“I don’t know,” said my 23-year-old daughter Marie as I visited her first apartment. “Look out the window and see.”

I did and found nothing to break a three-story fall to the sidewalk. “Well,” I said, trying to sound a positive note. “You might survive that drop. A cat almost certainly could. If you were thinking about getting one, that would be an argument for.”

She had been living in the apartment for two weeks before I could get to Brooklyn to visit. She asked, “How do you like it?”

“It’s excellent,” I said. It was a really big empty room in a converted factory. It had brick walls, high ceilings and a shiny hardwood floor. It looked like an art gallery without pictures.

Most of the furnishings had arrived with me. I had driven my car there with two kitchen chairs in the back seat, a bookshelf sticking out of the trunk and a queen-sized mattress lashed to the roof. I’d used my favorite rope. It’s about 40 feet long and a half-inch thick. I’d wrapped each end with thread so it wouldn’t unravel. It reminds me of the kind of rope sailors are always pulling on. I’m a great respecter of good rope, but I wasn’t always that way.

When I was Marie’s age, I tried to move a big mattress across Olympia, Wash., by merely placing it on the roof of my car. Optimistic, I figured if I drove slowly, there would be no need to tie it on. Somewhere along the route, the mattress took wing. Backtracking through town, I found it lying big and pink right in the middle of the street with cars detouring around it.

But you stack up a few decades and optimism fades and you learn how to tie a slip knot. Now, given enough time and rope, I could fasten a mattress onto the top of a jumbo jet.

“Show me your neighborhood,” I suggested.

About 100 feet from her front door, a large, foul-smelling rat lay dead on the sidewalk. Again, trying to be positive, I said, “Wow, that’s one heck of a rat!”

“It’s not as big as it looks,” she joked. “The fur adds 5 pounds.”

“I wonder what killed him,” I said, looking around. The neighborhood had no cute coffee shops, parks or corner grocery stores. It consisted entirely of old industrial buildings, some already converted to apartments and some noisily in the process. Everything was brick, concrete or asphalt. The passers-by looked kind of mean and sirens shrieked by one street over. Maybe the rat died of discouragement. I didn’t say it, though.

Our house is no Taj Mahal, but it has plenty of trees and other greenery around it. I didn’t like seeing Marie surrounded by such ugliness. But she has embarked upon her life and doesn’t seem to care. She’s doing a theater internship almost for free. She earns some money selling refreshments and by babysitting. Not afraid of work, she has lined up some freelance writing and hopes it’ll make ends meet. Her cheerful hopefulness makes me love her even more than usual.

I took her out to dinner and then slept over. Before leaving in the morning, I got my rope, tied one end of it to a radiator by the window and coiled it neatly on the floor. It blended with the shabby-chic industrial decor. “In case the stairwell is blocked by fire, take that chair and smash out this window,” I advised. “Then climb down this excellent rope.”

“Dad,” she said patiently, “Bricks don’t burn.”

“They can surprise you,” I said.

“I can’t climb down a rope,” she said.

“Sure you can. You just need the right incentive. Like an inferno at your back.”

“Well, thanks Dad,” she said with a slight smile. “I know how you feel about your rope.”

I kissed her goodbye and drove away. I should’ve said, “Certainly fire safety is nothing to sneer at. But really I just admire the brave way you’re taking on the city and setting up your life. And the escape plan is just my way of trying to make a meaningful contribution.” Maybe I’ll call her up and tell her. Everyone loves to receive a good, stout rope, but even flowers usually come with a card.